Secret house of Alekseevsky ravelin. Historical background

Alekseevsky ravelin

No one should have known about the existence of the Alekseevsky ravelin, because it was located in such a way that even when examining the fortress, it was completely invisible. The only access to Ravelin was through the huge Vasilyevsky Gate, which was located in the western wall and was always locked from the inside with a large lock. In addition to the wall, Ravelin was separated from the fortress by a small canal from the Bolshaya Neva to the Kronverk Strait: a small wooden bridge was thrown across this canal.

Only once a year residents of St. Petersburg could look at this prison, and then only from the height of the fortress wall. This happened on the day of Midsummer, when a solemn religious procession was held along the walls of the fortress bastions. Only then did the participants in the procession look with involuntary fear at the mysterious stone building standing in the middle of a quiet and deserted courtyard.

Ravelin was a one-story building with a triangular shape. The only door to it was located just opposite the Vasilyevsky Gate and led to the reception room; from it to the right and left there were internal corridors, which were interrupted in one of the corners by the caretaker’s apartment and the kitchen. The cells of the Alekseevsky ravelin were intended for the most dangerous state criminals: prisoners were placed here exclusively by order of the tsar, and only by "to the highest decree" they could have been released from here.

Until 1802, Ravelin was at the disposal of the Secret Expedition, then, like other parts of the Peter and Paul Fortress! came under the jurisdiction of its commandant, and was later removed from his jurisdiction and subordinated directly to the military governor of St. Petersburg. Supervision of the internal regulations in Ravelin was entrusted to a special person - the caretaker, under whose command the entire prison guard (a team of 50 people) consisted. Thus, the power of the commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress extended only to the outer guard of Ravelin, and what happened outside the walls of the prison was no longer within his competence. The officer who was entrusted with managing this terrible Ravelin had to live there alone, without a family; both the wife and children could not even enter this fortification, but had to live in the fortress. By "highest command" Ravelin's team was made up of people "capable, proven in conduct and in all respects suitable for the intended service".

The instructions provided for such measures that security, "having realized the importance of this post... it would be more convenient to have all the necessary caution and vigilance... to prevent an assassination attempt(prisoners - Ed.) to escape or to destroy one’s own life.” The prisoners were in solitary confinement, they could not communicate with each other and the outside world, the guards were forbidden to enter into any conversations with them, so as not to succumb "neither affectionate requests nor majestic threats". Even during a walk, no one had the right to see the prisoner except the guard. Warden Ravelin received an order from the military governor for each new prisoner, "how to deal with him".

Such was the ominous Alekseevsky ravelin, the very name of which plunged people into horror. P. E. Shchegolev wrote about him:

Who was sitting there, not only the ranks of the commandant’s department, but also those who served in this very prison were not allowed to know. To be imprisoned in this most secret prison and to be released from here, a command from the king was needed. Entry here was allowed to the commandant of the fortress, the chief of gendarmes and the manager of the III department. Only the caretaker could enter the prisoner's cell, and only someone else could enter the prisoner's cell.

Once in this prison, prisoners lost their last names and could only be called by number. When a prisoner died, his body was secretly transferred at night... to another room of the fortress, so that they would not think that there were prisoners in this prison. And in the morning the police came and took away the body, and the surname and first name of the deceased were given on a whim, whatever came up.

According to the original instructions of 1797, one of the lower ranks of the guard was always in the prisoner’s cell, but in 1821 this was no longer necessary, since small windows were made in the doors of the cells opening onto the inner corridor. From the side of the corridor they were covered with a green woolen curtain: by lifting a corner of it, the sentry could observe the prisoner. There were always two soldiers walking along the corridor with drawn sabers. Under the supervision of a non-commissioned officer on guard, the soldiers distributed lunch and tea to the prisoners, cleaned the cells and gave the prisoners a wash. Upon arrival at Ravelin, the prisoners' own linen, money and other things were taken from them, carefully examined and stored in the prison.

To “to diminish the boredom inseparable from their situation among the prisoners”, it was supposed to supply them with books from Ravelin’s library, "multiplying it by purchasing new books". The team leader was required to visit the prisoners several times a day, "being careful, however, to disturb them during sleep". He had to satisfy all claims of the prisoners, if it depended on him, in other cases - report them to the caretaker Ravelin.

Some of these rules may seem lenient, but solitary confinement in itself was a terrible punishment. Throughout its existence, the Alekseevsky Ravelin was the most secret and most severe prison in Russia, and as our story progresses we will talk about the prisoners who languished there. Here we will talk about the tragic fate of the Decembrist G.S. Batenkov - an extraordinary man, whose abilities were highly valued by M.M. Speransky and A.A. Arakcheev. Sentenced by the court to 20 years of hard labor, for some reason he was not sent to Siberia, but was placed in casemate No. 5 of the Alekseevsky ravelin. His cell was larger than usual: its length was approximately 8.5 meters and its width was about five meters. But the windows, pierced in the vaults - right up to the ceiling - did not let in any sunlight at all, and the chamber was illuminated by a lamp day and night.

For the first five years, G.S. Batenkov was in it hopelessly, without seeing a human face, without hearing a human voice: only the officer on duty inquired about his health, and on Easter the commandant of the fortress came to share Christ with the prisoner. Then he was allowed to walk in the garden: there he planted an apple tree and, by the end of his 20-year imprisonment, ate apples from it. The prisoner received food at his own request, mostly vegetarian, and he also received wine, but his loneliness was complete, since food was served to him through a window in the door. The only living creature with whom G.S. Batenkov communicated was a mouse he tamed, which every day - at the same time - crawled out of its hole to share the prisoner’s loneliness.

The prisoner was only allowed to read the Bible: the book was sent to him in different languages ​​and with dictionaries, and thus the prisoner learned several languages. At times G.S. Batenkov lost his mind: back in 1828 he wanted to take his own life by hunger and insomnia. But the prisoner did not go crazy, he just forgot how to speak, forgot many ordinary words and lost track of time: sometimes “It seemed to him that he had been sitting for several years, sometimes that he had been standing for several months in prayer and had not eaten anything all the time"... They say that the new commandant of the fortress, I.N. Skobelev, a simple Russian man who had risen from the ranks of the soldiers, at every opportunity reminded the tsar about the unfortunate prisoner, but it was all in vain: Nicholas I was inexorable.

After many years of imprisonment, G.S. Batenkov himself addressed the Tsar with the words of a mad man; from his pen came endless poems under the general title “Wild.” In 1846, the 20-year term of hard labor assigned to G. S. Batenkov expired, and the new chief of gendarmes A. F. Orlov, who replaced A. Kh. Benckendorff, reported to the Tsar about the possibility of mitigating the prisoner’s fate. Nicholas I then put forward the following resolution: “I agree, but he is being held only because he has been proven insane; he needs to be re-examined and then we can imagine what we can do with him further.”.

The commandant of the fortress certified "the quiet and meek behavior of a prisoner", and in mid-February 1846 G.S. Batenkov was sent to Tomsk. “When they released me from Ravelin... I was like a newborn baby,”- this is how he assessed his state of mind. Arriving at the place of settlement, the former prisoner wrote to his friend: “I spent twenty years in solitude. You, no doubt, thought that it was unbearably difficult for me. Maybe so; but there is something in the human soul more powerful than all evils - and this is more noticeable for a completely naked face. Be that as it may.” it was, but I bore the full weight of my situation, I did not grumble and do not grumble.”.

The history of the Alekseevsky ravelin is inextricably linked with the history of the Trubetskoy bastion - a secret prison for state criminals. Founded on July 1, 1733, the ravelin served for more than a hundred years as a place of detention for “special” prisoners, among whom was the son of the founder of St. Petersburg, Emperor Peter the Great.

On the day of the 282nd anniversary of the foundation of the western ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the site remembers how it was built.

Prison in fortification

The western fortification of the Peter and Paul Fortress was laid by Empress Anna Ioannovna on July 1, 1733 in honor of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. An auxiliary triangular structure in front of the fortress water moat served to cover the Vasilievskaya curtain and its gate. Initially, the ravelin had an exclusively fortification purpose - ramps were installed on it for lifting guns and ammunition, several gate passages were made, and in the 1780s it was lined with granite slabs.

The prison could accommodate 20 prisoners at a time. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org The completion of the ravelin in 1740 coincided with the death of Anna Ioannovna, and her successors decided the future fate of the building. During the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, this part of the fortress was left without much attention, and under Catherine the Great in 1769, a wooden prison was built on the territory of the ravelin. It was not for nothing that later they began to call it the “Secret House” - there was so little information about it that the first memories of prisoners became available only at the beginning of the 20th century.

Petty swindlers, thieves or criminals were not kept here. The prison was specially built behind the thick walls of the fortress so that it could house people who had committed crimes related to politics.

Nearby, on the territory of the fortress, in the 1730s, the Office of Secret Investigative Affairs was located - the main institution of the empire, engaged in political investigation. The wooden prison existed until 1797, after which it was replaced by a stone “Secret House” with 20 cells.

Complete isolation

In 1796, Emperor Paul I ordered: “For those held in custody on matters related to the Secret Expedition, a House should be made with the convenience of being kept in a fortress.” The estimate for the stone structure and the “Inventory of the belongings of the new state house in Alekseevsky ravelin” confirm that we are talking about the “Secret House”, which operated as a prison until 1884.

Today tourists in the Peter and Paul Fortress are told about the conditions of detention of prisoners in the following way: the one-story stone prison was an equilateral triangle, inside of which there was a walking area for prisoners. The windows of the “numbered chambers” looked out onto the outer courtyard of the ravelin.

Plan of the Alekseevsky ravelin. From the book by P. S. Polivanov “Alekseevsky Ravelin”, Leningrad, 1926. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org Each cell had a tiled stove, in several chambers there was a bed with semi-down feather beds and pillows and quilted chintz blankets, armchairs, soft chairs and a card table, a mirror, a couch. Most of the cells were simply furnished: a simple table and chair, a bed with a reindeer wool mattress, a soup bowl, a clay spoon and bottle, and wooden cutlery. The four unnumbered "extra" cameras were the most modest.

A soldier was on guard at the cells around the clock, so the prisoners were never left alone, although they were in solitary confinement. Three times a day, the head of the guard walked around all occupied cells. Emperor Alexander I abolished this rule, released a significant number of prisoners, and transferred the “Secret House” to the jurisdiction of the St. Petersburg military governor, after which the regime of detention there was significantly relaxed.

This led to the fact that prisoners were able to correspond and even see their relatives without the knowledge of their superiors, so in 1812 it was decided to tighten the rules again.

Prisoners

Having lost the opportunity to correspond, the prisoners came up with the idea of ​​rapping - a special “alphabet” was invented by the Decembrist Mikhail Bestuzhev, breaking the alphabet into vertical and horizontal rows, and denoting each letter with two numbers corresponding to its place. The Bestuzhev table was improved by subsequent generations of prisoners, and soon became the “secret language” of the populists. The jailers also learned about this and began placing prisoners so that the neighboring cells were empty on all sides.

The Military Archives building was built on the site of the prison. Photo: Google Maps

Over the years of the prison's existence, members of a wide variety of political unrest passed through its walls. Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich was imprisoned here, and in 1775 the so-called Princess Tarakanova was kept. In 1849, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, who was arrested in the Petrashevsky case, was kept in the “Secret House” of the Alekseevsky Ravelin for eight months. Bakunin and Chernyshevsky visited here, and the former later wrote that “... in such conditions Napoleon will become stupid, and Jesus himself will become embittered.”

During the investigation, the Decembrists Pestel, Ryleev, Muravyov-Apostol, Volkonsky, Trubetskoy, and Bestuzhevs were kept in 20 solitary confinement cells. In 1882-1884, members of the Narodnaya Volya organization were imprisoned.

In February 1838, the question arose about the need to overhaul the “Secret House,” which was rapidly deteriorating after the flood of 1824. It was repaired, after which it stood until 1893 and was dismantled.

Today, on the site of the former prison, stands the yellow building of the War Ministry archives with two service outbuildings for officers.

Eastern part of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

For a long time, the main state prison of Tsarist Russia was the Alekseevsky Ravelin, even those who served in the Peter and Paul Fortress did not know about life there. P.E. Shchegolev wrote in his book “Alekseevsky Ravelin” - Who was sitting there, not only the ranks of the commandant’s department, but also those who served in this very prison were not allowed to know. To be imprisoned in this most secret prison and to be released from here, a command from the tsar was necessary. Entry here was allowed to the commandant of the fortress, the chief of gendarmes and the manager of the III department. Only the caretaker could enter the prisoner’s cell, and only with the caretaker someone else. Once in this prison, prisoners lost their surnames and could only be called by number.

We were able to find very little official information about the condition of the Alekseevsky ravelin over the last 15 years of its existence (1870-1884). Apparently, during this period no major repair work was carried out in the ravelin. The fact that in the 70s the number of prisoners fluctuated from one to three people per year did not make the administration want to renovate prison premises. It can be assumed that some of the buildings were heated irregularly, and this led to the formation of dampness in the cell, which prisoners wrote about in the 80s.

In August 1881, Alexander III decided to abolish the Alekseevsky ravelin, creating instead a new prison on Shlisselburg Island. Of course, the tsar’s decision to build a new prison and the preparations for this that began in 1881 removed the question of any serious repairs to the Alekseevsky ravelin.

Information about the repair of the Alekseevsky ravelin is available in two files of the fortress. One of these files reports work carried out on the ravelin in July and August 1881, when the prison contained only three prisoners, but when preparations were apparently already being made for the reception of others. During the indicated two months, the tiled stoves that had fallen into disrepair were repaired and the cracks in them were covered with clay.

The glass in the frames was replaced with frosted glass, and the prison, surrounded by high fortress walls, became even more gloomy. The plaster that had fallen off the walls was greased up. The outside of the building has been painted. Apparently the building was in such a state of decay that at least this minor repair was absolutely necessary.

Some very brief information about the condition of the Alekseevsky ravelin is available in another archival file from 1880-1882 - “Inventory of inventory located in the Alekseevsky ravelin.” However, this information relates to the characteristics of the daily life of prisoners.

From this inventory it is clear that in the ravelin and in the years we indicated, hand and leg shackles and even a neck chain continued to be preserved from ancient times. Cases of use of the latter are unknown.

In 1882, apparently on the initiative of the caretaker Sokolov, nicknamed “Herod,” 16 iron plates were made on 16 doors of solitary confinement cells and 16 locks were purchased for them.

In June 1883, i.e. 14 months before the ravelin was closed, 14 locks were purchased to lock the windows from the outside. Warden Sokolov felt calm with these locks on the doors and window frames2.

These locks were an unnecessary precaution. During the entire period of its existence, no one escaped from the ravelin. However, on June 16, 1881, a fact occurred that aroused the suspicion of the commandant of the fortress. The commandant reported to the Ministry of Internal Affairs about the detention on the roof of the bastion of Zotov, facing the Alekseevsky ravelin, an unknown man in military uniform, who called himself a military clerk and did not give a satisfactory explanation of his presence on the roof of the bastion. The arrested man was sent to the mayor, and his further fate is unknown.

The above 16 linings on the doors of prison cells and locks on the frames exhaust our information about the construction in the Alekseevsky ravelin. From the memoirs of prisoner Polivanov given below, we learn that the linings were metal strips the width of a palm. This heavy metal strip was placed over the door from one frame to the other and secured with a padlock at one end. Applying and removing this strip made a lot of noise. If these massive strips strengthened the prison locks, they did not strengthen the prison building, which was collapsing from the terrible dampness in it. It was overcrowded with prisoners in the period from 1882 to 1884. did not allow major corrections to be made during this time, even if they were absolutely necessary.

The building of the Alekseevsky Ravelin, even after its closure in August 1884, existed for several more years before it was demolished in 1895. This building was demolished under tsarism, and thus it did not have to live to see the revolution and be turned, like the Trubetskoy Bastion, into the Museum of the Revolution. This building had even more grounds for such a transformation than the Trubetskoy Bastion, since the names of many glorious fighters against tsarism are associated with it.

The government's decision to close the Alekseevsky Ravelin prison raises the question: what caused this closure? We did not find an answer to this important question in the official materials. It can be assumed that several reasons had an influence here. It should not be forgotten that the Alekseevsky ravelin was replaced by a new prison on Shlisselburg Island with 40 solitary cells and an old one with 10 cells. Ravelin with its 20 cameras was no longer sufficient due to the growth of the revolutionary movement.

The location of the most important convict political prison in St. Petersburg itself was an undoubted inconvenience: there was always the danger of prisoners having intercourse with strangers outside the prison and the possibility of escape from the ravelin. This was confirmed by Nechaev’s communications through the gendarmes with his comrades at large. Perhaps this reason was of primary importance in this case. The prison on Shlisselburg Island, several dozen miles from the capital, was particularly convenient due to its isolation from the outside world. At the same time, these dozens of miles did not make it difficult for the center to exercise constant control over it.

It is unlikely that the unsanitary conditions of the ancient building of the Alekseevsky ravelin, where prisoners almost inevitably fell ill and many died, played any role in the decision to close the ravelin, since, despite the development of diseases and mortality in 1883, the government continued to place political prisoners and in 1884. One could say that the Alekseevsky ravelin was not closed, but moved to the Shlisselburg fortress. Warden Sokolov, some of the gendarmes, and all the prisoners were transferred to the new prison. The property of the Alekseevsky ravelin was also transferred to the new Shlisselburg prison, as evidenced by the special archival file “On the transfer of things and property of the house of the Alekseevsky ravelin to the Shlisselburg gendarmerie department.”

We had to get acquainted with one inventory of the property of the Alekseevsky ravelin, as we indicated above, earlier in the archival file we used for 1880-1882. The composition of this property has remained largely unchanged since that time. The list of things intended for transfer to the Shlisselburg fortress included the furnishings of prison cells, prisoner clothing, linen and shoes, kitchen utensils, a few tools, tableware, books in the prison library, icons, etc.

Particularly noteworthy is the presence in the list of things to be transferred to the Shlisselburg fortress, already known to us from the previous presentation, of five hand shackles, eight leg shackles and one neck chain. It is not clear why this neck chain, the use of which had long been abolished by law, was not destroyed.

Speaking about the state of the Alekseevsky ravelin, one cannot ignore the question of the ravelin’s library. This interesting question was resolved only now after we found the library catalogue. One copy of such a catalog ended up in the archival file of the inquiry into Nechaev’s relations with free revolutionaries, the other - in the case of the surrender of the property of the Alekseevsky ravelin in connection with the closure of the prison of this ravelin.

The lists of books in the Alekseevsky Ravelin Library list 435 book titles in Russian, and, moreover, many of the works of one or another author are presented in full in many volumes, and books of religious content in several copies. In addition to books in Russian, the catalog contains 175 books in French, the titles of which are not given. A large place in the number of titles belongs to books of religious content (No. 298-345). However, religious literature did not supplant scientific literature and fiction. Books on various branches of knowledge were presented in the library by the works of the most important Russian and foreign authors. Literature of fictional content was selected quite comprehensively. So, for example, there were complete works of Byron, Goethe, Schiller, Dickens, Spielhagen, Pisemsky, Mordovtsev, L. Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Grigorovich, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Dostoevsky, Krestovsky, Maykov, Potekhin, Pechersky, Stanyukovich, Gleb Uspensky and others. There were works by Belinsky and Dobrolyubov. The list contains many books on history, including works by: Solovyov, Schlosser, Weber, Gervinus, Draper, Macaulay, etc. There were works on geography, botany, physiology, mathematics and other branches of knowledge. The library also had editions of the “Course of Criminal Law” by Prof. Tagantsev, edition of 1867. The selection of books was not systematic, but indicated a high level of reader interest.

A significant number of books were published in the 60s and 70s. They came to the library mostly at the request of Nechaev, as we will see below from the essay about Nechaev. Noteworthy is the presence in the list of a complete set of the “Bulletin of Europe” for 1876. The library was composed partly of books that belonged to the prisoners themselves, who provided them to the library upon leaving the ravelin, and partly the library was replenished by the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the request of prisoners (for example, Nechaev and Mirsky). Over the last four years of the existence of the Alekseevsky Ravelin, the supply of new books has ceased. Unfortunately, the archival files do not contain any information about the composition of books in foreign languages. It should be assumed that the indication that the library has 175 books only in French does not correspond to reality; that, in addition to books in French, there should have been books in other foreign languages. Our assumption that the library contains books in various foreign languages ​​is confirmed by the inclusion of English-Russian, German-Russian, etc. in the list of dictionaries.

Regarding the fate of the library of the Alekseevsky Ravelin after its closure, we found a request from the state police department to provide it with a list of books and hand over the books to the head of the Shlisselburg gendarme department, Colonel Pokroshinsky2. It is not known which books were actually handed over, but it is known that in this fortress in the first years after the opening of a new prison in it (in 1884), the administration preferred to give prisoners only books of religious content. This was the case in the Alekseevsky Ravelin in recent years before its closure. Thus, the composition of the library did not yet determine the extent of its use by prisoners. Here everything depended on the arbitrariness of the administration.

In the memoirs of former prisoners of the ravelin, in the press, as well as in the previous archival files we used, there were no indications of the existence of basement casemates in the Alekseevskaya ravelin. In the above-mentioned archival file we read: “In one of the basement casemates of the ravelin” old files of the former III department are kept. These lines undoubtedly prove the existence in the ravelin, in addition to the first floor cells, also of basement casemates. We have not received information about imprisonment in these casemates. It can be assumed that the casemates were used in the first years of the ravelin's existence, information about which has not reached us. In any case, the very fact of the existence of such casemates is significant.

The 55 bales of files from the 3rd department, stored in one of these basement casemates, were burned by order of the police department. It is unknown which files of the III department were kept in the basement casemate of the ravelin behind seven doors and seven locks.

Ravelin's cases, numbering 231, were handed over to the police department on September 29, 1884. This ended the existence of this state prison. But history will never forget the terrible Alekseevsky ravelin.

PRISONERS OF ALEXEEVSKY RAVELIN

The last period of the history of the Alekseevsky ravelin covers 1870-1884. From the two previous volumes of our research it is known that the history of the ravelin recorded on its tablets many names of the prisoners of this ravelin. Until 1870, the largest political processes gave their representatives to the dungeons of this royal dungeon: soldiers of the Semenovsky regiment, Decembrists, Petrashevites, Karakozovites, writers - revolutionary democrats succeeded each other.

Over the course of three quarters of the 19th century, great changes took place in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement: the noble period of the revolution developed and outlived its time, which was replaced by the raznochinsky period. This period was represented by the last prisoners of the ravelin.

In their revolutionary tactics, these prisoners represented the two largest currents - propaganda and terrorists. Since both were united in secret political parties and set as their task conspiratorial activities to overthrow the autocracy, they seemed to the tsarist government to be especially dangerous enemies. This circumstance left its mark on the history of the ravelin, especially over the last 5 years of its existence. Never in all previous times had the Ravelin regime been the same as it became in the 5 years before the closure of this state prison in August 1884. The reader will see below that this was a regime designed to kill prisoners.

No matter how short the period is - 15 years - it should be divided into two parts: the first of them covers the 70s, and the second - the period from 1880 to 1884. In the 70s, when the number of prisoners in Ravelin dropped to one and did not exceed three, events unprecedented up to that time took place: Nechaev, who was imprisoned here, successfully carried out propaganda among the prison guards, actually abolishing the typical features of the prison regime, and established relations with members of the revolutionary party at large. Our subsequent essay about Nechaev’s stay in ravelin is dedicated to these exceptional events.

Despite the fact that the second part of the period under study covers only four years, it is characterized by a brutal regime. We will see below that cruelty was shown not in stormy battles between the prison administration and prisoners, but in a completely calm, thoughtful and sophisticated manner. These last years of the ravelin's existence concluded its history.

Turning to the prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin, we give a list of them for the period under study. Beideman, who is first on this list and stayed in the ravelin from 1861 to 1881, is described in the second volume. We give special essays about Nechaev and Mirsky, convicted - the first in 1873, and the second in 1879. The conditions of stay in the ravelin for all the other prisoners were so similar that we assigned one general profile to these prisoners of the 80s.

In the list of prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin for 1870-1884. are the names of 26 prisoners.

In the list of prisoners in the Alekseevsky Ravelin in 1882-1884, attached to Polivanov’s book “Alekseevsky Ravelin” (ed. 1926), three are mistakenly placed: A. V. Dolgushin was transferred from Kara to the Peter and Paul Fortress in June 1883, and on August 4, 1884, transferred to the Shlisselburg fortress; Klimenko M.F., convicted in the trial of 17, was transferred to the Shlisselburg fortress; Malevsky V.E. was transferred from Siberia to the Peter and Paul Fortress on June 31, 1883, and on August 4 - to the Shlisselburg Fortress.

From this list of prisoners, attached to Polivanov’s book, it is clear that 14 prisoners were students of higher or other educational institutions. One was an assistant attorney, one was a lieutenant in the navy, one was a laborer, one was an employee of the state police department. Of the total number of prisoners, 17 were sentenced to death, and 4 to indefinite hard labor. From our list of 26 prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin, it is clear that they entered the ravelin: one in 1861, two in the 70s (1873 and 1879), 23 people in the period from 1880 to 1884. Beideman (20 years) and Nechaev (10 years) spent the longest periods in ravelin. Eight people spent less than a year in the ravelin (one of them died), seven were transferred to the Shlisselburg fortress. The rest spent from one to three years in ravelin, six of them died here, and the rest were transferred to Shlisselburg.

LIST OF PRISONERS IN ALEXEEVSKY RAVELIN IN THE PERIOD FROM 1870 TO 1884

Among the prisoners of the ravelin, the fate of Nechaev, who died in the ravelin after a ten-year stay there, is especially remarkable.

NECHAYEV

In the second volume of the “History of the Tsar’s Prison” it was indicated that by the beginning of the 70s, only Beideman was a prisoner of the Alekseevsky ravelin. On January 28, 1873, a new political prisoner was imprisoned in the same ravelin, whose name was widely known at that time in the revolutionary movement - it was Sergei Nechaev. For us, the case of this prisoner is of outstanding interest not only in the history of the royal prison, but also in the history of the royal “justice”. We identified individual features of this justice in the first and second volumes of “The History of the Tsar’s Prison” and in the second chapter of this volume. We saw the rude, undisguised interest of Catherine II when she dealt with Radishchev, Novikov Krechetov, Princess Tarakanova and other prisoners of the Peter and Paul and Shlisselburg fortresses. We have seen the transformation of Emperor Nicholas I into a detective, investigator, judge and executioner in the case of the Decembrists and Petrashevites. During the Chernyshevsky trial, we learned about the use of forgeries, the fabrication of false documents and the recruitment of false witnesses. Always in these cases, the name of a judicial verdict by decree of “His Majesty” was used to cover up the arbitrariness of the brutal reprisal of the autocracy against its enemies.

In the Nechaev trial, the tsarist government did not hesitate to repeat what it had done in previous political trials: to commit a series of deceptions and gross violence and replace the harsh judicial verdict with an even more cruel arbitrariness of the sovereign will.

Nechaev, obsequiously arrested by the Swiss government and extradited to the Russian government as a criminal, was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor, but Alexander II, with the stroke of a pen, replaced the exile in Siberia with imprisonment in the Alekseevsky ravelin and instead of 20 years, he wrote “forever” with his own hand, emphasizing this so hopeless sounding word.

The Nechaev trial was one of the largest in the era of the 70s. Nechaev’s personal qualities, his iron will and talent as a propagandist brought his trial, and then his ten-year stay in the Alekseevsky Ravelin, to first place in the history of the 70s. He wrote unusual pages in the history of the Alekseevsky ravelin with his amazing propaganda success among the gendarmes of the ravelin; he established regular relations through the gendarmes with the Narodnaya Volya party. Within the walls of the ravelin, he did the same thing for which he ended up in the ravelin. His relations with the committee of the Narodnaya Volya party were an exceptional phenomenon in the entire history of this political dungeon. But during Nechaev’s stay in the fortress there were other facts that proved his exceptional character. For example, neither earlier nor later was there a case of such prolonged shackling in leg and hand shackles as was applied to Nechaev: he was shackled in hand shackles for more than two years. In the same way, we do not know of any other cases where a special sentry was placed under the window of a ravelin’s solitary cell, as was done in relation to Nechaev. Only about him alone were weekly reports delivered to the chief of gendarmes instead of the usual monthly statements with the names of the prisoners being held. All this shows that Nechaev’s stay in the ravelin provided a lot of material for the history of the royal prison.

Moving on to the description of Nechaev’s stay in the Alekseevsky ravelin, we have every reason to say that the conditions of this stay formed the history of the ravelin itself in the 70s. Although Beideman was also imprisoned there during these same years, the history of the ravelin was “done” by Nechaev alone. Never was the life of a ravelin so vibrant and varied with events as under Nechaev, and yet at that time almost two dozen cells were empty. The archival materials that have reached us, collected by Shchegolev after the October Revolution and published by him in an extensive article, exhaustively introduce us to this period in the history of Ravelin 1.

Nechaev entered the arches of the Alekseevsky ravelin on January 28, 1873. The commandant of the fortress gave the caretaker special instructions on the conditions of keeping the new prisoner in the fortress. It not only repeated the previous rules about storing keys to cells, about guards entering cells only in the presence of a warden, about monitoring the strength of locks, bars, etc., but also made new additional instructions. An innovation was the commandant’s order to post a sentry at the window on the outside of Nechaev’s cell at night. This precaution was, of course, unnecessary, since in the history of Ravelin there was not a single case of escape from this fortress. But the commandant's order shows the importance attached to the protection of the new prisoner. In order to ensure the strictest protection of the prisoner, the instructions required the permission of the commandant for each removal of Nechaev from his cell for a walk or to the bathhouse and reminded the warden not to leave the fortress without it.

This did not exhaust the precautions taken by the commandant to prevent Nechaev’s escape or contact with him by strangers. In March 1873, four new positions of so-called sworn non-commissioned officers were established for the ravelin. For the Peter and Paul Fortress, twelve such positions were introduced back on February 23, 1870; for three years they managed in the ravelin without these “jurors,” but the imprisonment of Nechaev in the ravelin prompted the cautious commandant and the III department to decide to use these new guards. According to their official position, they were observers of the sentries and responsible to the caretaker for the exact execution of all the rules of the ravelin. At the same time, to some extent they served as control over the caretaker himself. It was their duty to remain in the prisoner's cell whenever authorized persons entered it. Only by special order of the warden was the “juror” to leave the prisoner’s cell when visited by another person.

The III department, guarding Nechaev in Alekseevskaya ravelin, went even further. In addition to the usual monthly reports about prisoners in the ravelin, the chief of gendarmes ordered, as mentioned above, information about Nechaev for the past 7 days to be delivered to him every week. This was also an innovation, since such reports had never been made about anyone before. They were not made about anyone later, until the ravelin was closed.

Unfortunately, Shchegolev was able to find only some of these weekly reports. This is all the more offensive since they provide abundant material about Nechaev’s stay in the ravelin.

The first of these reports covered the period from February 2 to February 9. It reported when the prisoner got up in the morning and went to bed in the evening. It was reported that throughout the day he read the "Military Collection" for 1869, often walks around the room and rarely lies down on the bed. Even small details were noted, such as: “Recently he has become more friendly, his face is more cheerful and he has begun to look into the eyes, whereas before he avoided meetings, answered abruptly, in a sharp tone, with lowered eyes and a drooping head.” The report conveys in great detail and in Nechaev’s own words Nechaev’s request, which he verbally stated to the caretaker, to provide him with books and writing materials for scientific work. He motivated this by the fear of going crazy without any work. The second report for the week, from February 9 to 16, again repeated information about when Nechaev went to bed and when he got up. Again it was reported about reading the “Military Collection” for 1870, about walking around the cell, about good sleep and appetite. Both of these reports were reported to the king. This suggests that the idea of ​​these weekly reports about the prisoner came from him himself. Our assumption is confirmed by the fact that reports were sent to the king even abroad. One can be surprised at such an interest of Alexander II in a man whom he locked forever within the walls of the ravelin.

Nechaev received the writing materials and books he requested within a month. The works he needed in Russian and foreign languages ​​were purchased for him in a bookstore. Writing instruments made it possible for Nechaev to make extracts from the books he read and engage in literary work. This went on for three years. In early February 1876, not only Nechaev’s writing materials were taken away, but everything. what he managed to write during the three years of his imprisonment. Such was the will of Alexander II. Nechaev was deprived of the right to read for appealing to the Tsar with a request to review his case. In his petition, Nechaev insisted on the complete illegality of the court verdict, on the incorrectness of his extradition by the Swiss government, emphasized the tsar’s guarantee “with his imperial word” to the Swiss government for the correctness and “impartiality of the court” and recalled that then, during the trial, he refused to recognize its correctness and called the Moscow District Court the “Shemyakin Court”. Nechaev did not forget to remind the tsar the words of his decree about truth and mercy in the courts.

Neither the content of the prisoner’s appeal to the Tsar, nor its very tone could be pleasing to the one by whose decree this “Shemyakin trial” was carried out. But the punishment that befell the author of the note was excessively cruel. Nechaev's mental balance was completely disrupted. On the very first night after his papers were taken away, he burst into screams and curses and broke 12 panes of glass from the window of his cell. For this, he was put in a straitjacket, tied to a bed, and then shackled in leg and hand shackles. He remained in leg shackles for three months, and the hand shackles were removed from him after two years.

The papers taken from Nechaev were studied in the III department and, by order of the tsar, were burned, but their contents are introduced to us to some extent by a report on their review, compiled for the chief of the gendarmes and, obviously, for the tsar himself. It shows what Nechaev was doing in his solitary confinement. We have to regret that this prisoner’s work has not been preserved. It would be of particular interest for the history of Alekseevsky Ravelin, since among the destroyed works was the essay “Impression of Prison Life (Living Grave).” The contents of this essay are not given in the note, but its title itself speaks volumes. Among the author’s other works are “Letter from London”, “Political Thoughts”, “On the Tasks of Modern Democracy” and the article “On the Nature of the Youth Movement in the Late 60s”. Among the destroyed works were a significant number of fiction, including novels from the life of emigrants, from the life of student circles, from the time of the fall of the second empire in France, etc. The author of the memo especially noted Nechaev’s sketches: “In the kingdom of the bourgeoisie” - the fall of the Commune - and “ In the mezzanine and attic” - preparation for the action of the international (as in the original - M. G.). The largest number of papers were notes related to books read. The author of the memo also tried to characterize Nechaev’s personality. The characterization includes mostly negative traits, but at the same time emphasizes Nechaev’s amazing perseverance and willpower.

Nechaev especially demonstrated these latter qualities in the struggle for the right to read books and use writing instruments. The III Department, although it provided the prisoner with German and French books, made a ridiculous attempt to provide him with books of religious content. Thus, in March 1878, the III Department suggested that the commandant “invisibly” place books of spiritual content in Nechaev’s cell. This attempt caused Nechaev to become sharply irritated for the whole day. His irritation also increased because he had almost no books to read, and those sent from the III Department did not satisfy him either in quantity or quality. After one of these dispatches, the strong-willed Nechaev was even brought to tears, as the caretaker reported. He didn't eat for the whole day. Having been deprived of paper for several years, he resorted to an original protest. In April 1880, he wrote an appeal to Alexander II on the wall of his cell. According to the commandant, it was scratched with a teaspoon on a wall painted with ocher, and according to Vestnik Narodnoy Volya, it was written in blood. In this appeal, he wrote that the Third Department, depriving him of new books and magazines, dooms him to madness, and ended like this: “I notify you, sir, that the Third Department of Your Majesty’s Office can deprive me of my mind only with my life, and not otherwise".

At the same time, Nechaev began a hunger strike that lasted 5 days and ended in his victory. He was delivered 10 foreign books and a catalog of French books. He continued to fight further, realizing that stopping this fight would cause a delay in the delivery of new books. To his insistence, the future prisoners of Ravelin were obliged to purchase books worth about 700 rubles for the Ravelin library. But this sending did not diminish Nechaev’s energy in the struggle to read books.

In 1881, many books were sent to the Alekseevsky ravelin, references to which are not found in the memoirs of former prisoners of this ravelin. For example, the works of Goethe, Pisemsky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Grigorovich, Maykov, Byron, Schiller, Lermontov, Potekhin, Stanyukovich, Dickens, Dobrolyubov, Spielhagen, Belinsky, Ostrovsky, Zhukovsky, Schlosser, etc. were sent. These books were included in the list books from the Alekseevsky Ravelin library. Probably, from 1882 the prisoner's use of these books ceased.

Nechaev was not at all successful in the fight for the return of his writing instruments and papers. The king's ban remained in force. When an attempt was made to provide the prisoner with a slate board instead of paper, he wrote his protest on this board and sent it back to the commandant, and tried to make his notes on the wall of the cell. In August 1880, on a piece of paper given to him to compile a list of books to read, he wrote an appeal to the state police department protesting against the unsatisfactory delivery of books and the prohibition of written classes since 1876. He wrote that he spends “boringly painful days walking from corner to corner in the dungeon, like an animal in his cage,” and even more painful nights “listening to the insane screams of an unfortunate neighbor, reduced by solitary confinement to a terrible state,” and is afraid that such the same fate awaits him. He did not receive writing materials from the police department, but managed to obtain them from the guards guarding him. We will dwell on this absolutely exceptional fact.

In fact, there is nothing more striking than the transformation of the sentries of the strictest state prison of the Alekseevsky Ravelin into accomplices of the prisoner in establishing his relations with the outside world. This fact becomes all the more surprising given that the prisoner communicated with the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya party, and that these communications continued for several months and were conducted in the most regular manner. At the same time, not one or two ravelin sentries became accomplices of secret correspondence, but a significant number of them. We can say that the guards of the ravelin were under the command of Nechaev. It is not the task of the history of the royal prison to identify Nechaev’s talents as a propagandist, so let’s just say that he acted with tenacity, energy and perseverance, applying a variety of approaches to each person.

We remind you that the Ravelin’s instructions prohibited the sentries from answering any questions from the prisoners. Under such and such conditions, Nechaev forced the sentries not only to speak, but also to act. Nechaev’s connection with the sentries began in 1877. The prisoner managed to win over some of them in such a way that they began to bring him newspapers or some food purchased with their own money. In his relations with the sentries, Nechaev showed himself to be a political propagandist, as he had been before his arrest. He spoke about the plight of peasants and soldiers, about the upcoming revolution, about the confiscation of land from landowners to divide it among the peasants, about the transfer of factories and factories to workers. Nechaev himself, in a letter to the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya party, characterized the soldiers among whom he carried out propaganda: “...they don’t believe in God, they consider the tsar a monster and the cause of all evil, they expect a rebellion that will destroy all the authorities and the rich and establish people's happiness, universal equality and freedom."

Initially, Nechaev established relations with Mirsky, who was again imprisoned in ravelin on November 28, 1879, and shot at the chief of the Drenteln gendarmes. Later, with the help of the same sentries, he established relations with Stepan Shiryaev, who was imprisoned in the ravelin on November 10, 1880 in the trial of 16. From this latter he learned the addresses he needed, and soon correspondence began to arrive regularly from the Alekseevsky ravelin to the free revolutionaries and from them to the prisoner in the ravelin. Thus, 7 years after Nechaev was imprisoned in the ravelin, where exceptional precautions were established for his detention, all barriers collapsed, all prohibitions fell away, and Nechaev’s intercourse with the will actually began.

Nechaev’s life in ravelin changed completely. He took an exciting interest in working among soldiers and gendarmes. The life of these ravelin guards also became interesting. In the duty room they discussed political issues, read proclamations and the latest issues of Narodnaya Volya, and even learned how to write in code. They protected Nechaev from unpleasant surprises when he wrote his notes on freedom. The prisoner himself used individual gendarmes and sentries in different ways. To some he entrusted relations both inside and outside the ravelin, to others only relations inside the ravelin with the prisoners Mirsky and Shiryaev. Not one of these gendarmes and sentries turned out to be traitors. The most vile role of a traitor was played by Mirsky, who was also a prisoner of the ravelin. He committed this betrayal by revealing the secret of Nechaev’s impending escape. In his letters from ravelin, Nechaev touched on several topics. He not only pondered escape plans, but also drew up projects for various methods of revolutionary influence on the broad masses of the people. His projects did not receive practical significance not only because they were very controversial from the point of view of the revolutionary ethics of the Narodnaya Volya party, but also because the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volya party was at that time busy preparing an attempt on the life of Alexander II. Nechaev himself admitted that all the forces of the party should be devoted to preparing for such an assassination attempt and that only after this could the work of liberating him from the fortress begin. The government's defeat of the Narodnaya Volya party after March 1, 1881 left Nechaev within the walls of the ravelin. Soon Mirsky's betrayal took place. It can be assumed that Nechaev was restrained in his relations with Mirsky, who was not aware of the details of Nechaev’s relationship with the will and did not know exactly how the escape from the ravelin was supposed to take place. Apparently, Mirsky made his messages gradually and began them with a denunciation of a supposedly possible attack on the ravelin from the river. In any case, the commandant of the fortress learned about the possibility of escape before he learned that the ravelin’s team was on Nechaev’s side.

Beginning on November 16, for a whole month, the commandant took precautions against escape from the ravelin, but did not suspect any of his subordinates of any deviations from the rules of service.

In mid-December, an unprecedented event occurred in Ravelin: all the gendarmes, including 5 non-commissioned officers and 29 privates, were arrested and themselves found themselves prisoners of the Peter and Paul Fortress. At the same time, the entire rest of the team (at least 75 people) was removed and the caretaker of the ravelin was removed from his post. Gradually increasing, the number of arrested gendarmerie non-commissioned officers and privates reached 681. These were the numerical results of the activities of the prisoner, who, according to the initial plans of the government, was to be kept in the ravelin in extremely strict conditions. When Alexander III was presented with a report on this case, he wrote on it the following inscription: “A more shameful case for the military command and its superiors, I think, has never happened before.” This content of the resolution showed the degree of irritation and at the same time demanded that there be no mercy for the perpetrators.

When put on trial, 24 people were convicted of failure to comply with the special duties of guard duty, and 19 people were found guilty of a state crime. By the verdict of the military court, the defendants were sentenced to various punishments, including disciplinary battalions. The caretaker of the ravelin was sentenced to exile in the Arkhangelsk province, and his assistant Andreev was imprisoned in the Catherine Curtain for eight months 1.

Although all the crimes of the convicts, without exception, were related to the activities of Nechaev, he was not brought to trial, his last name was not mentioned, instead “prisoner No. 5” was constantly mentioned. Nechaev's cell was number 5 and was the place from where all the paths of communication with the will came from and where the prisoner carried out energetic work.

After Nechaev’s activities were discovered, he was transferred to cell No. 1 on December 29, 1881. It was located in the so-called small corridor of the front facade. This corridor was completely isolated from the larger corridor. It had three cells, of which one - No. 2 - was the gendarmes' duty room. Thus, the possibility of intercourse with other prisoners in any form was excluded; Nechaev was no longer taken out even for walks. After the consideration in the military court of the case on charges of gendarme non-commissioned officers and privates of Ravelin (from the beginning of June), the director of the police department Plehve notified the commandant that the Minister of Internal Affairs found it absolutely correct to dress Nechaev in convict clothing, give him simple food and deprive him of reading books except gospels and bibles.

The government found it “absolutely correct” to hasten Nechaev’s death. After just five and a half months, it achieved this. November 21, 1882 Nechaev died. At night, his body was secretly removed from the cell where he was buried alive, and handed over to the police bailiff for burial as the corpse of an “unknown” in a cemetery outside the fortress.

The tsarist government did everything possible to kill Nechaev. The killing of Nechaev by the Ravelin administration was quite deliberate. This is documented by the report of the prison doctor, who only 12 days before Nechaev’s death found it necessary to provide him with a daily walk and half a bottle of milk for treatment. It is difficult to imagine that a seriously ill prisoner could walk. Deprivation of walks for a long time and meager food in conditions of complete isolation led the prisoner to death.

There is almost no information about Nechaev’s life after the trial of the sentries and his transfer to cell No. 1 in the small corridor. It must be assumed that the prisoner endured his complete isolation especially hard, since before this his life in the ravelin was filled with communication with the will, and propaganda among the sentries, and reading books.

Almost 10 years of Nechaev’s imprisonment in the Alekseevskaya ravelin wrote, as we have seen, a completely special page in the history of the ravelin. Its peculiarity lies in the destruction of the cruel regime, which the prisoner achieved not from the highest authorities of the fortress, not from the minister, not from the king, but from the soldiers and gendarmes of the ravelin. The tenfold cruelty of this regime after the conviction of the soldiers and even the deliberate bringing of Nechaev to premature death by the prison administration do not destroy this feature.

MIRLY

On November 28, 1879, Leon Mirsky was imprisoned in the Alekseevsky Ravelin. At that time, there were two prisoners already known to us: Beideman and Nechaev. Mirsky was brought here from the Trubetskoy Bastion after the St. Petersburg Military District Court sentenced him to death for the attempted murder of the chief of gendarmes Drenteln. Mirsky jumped on his horse to the window of Drenteln's carriage and shot at him, but missed. He managed to escape and was arrested only a few months later. When arrested, he offered armed resistance.

Despite his twenty years of age, he already had a revolutionary past: for propaganda and for facilitating the escape of three political figures from a Kyiv prison, he was imprisoned in this prison, and then transported to the Peter and Paul Fortress. From here he was released on bail in January 1879, and two months later he shot Drenteln. Sentenced to death, he submitted a request for clemency, and the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment.

After the death penalty was replaced with hard labor, Mirsky, while in the Trubetskoy Bastion, turned to the commandant of the fortress with a request to send him an Orthodox priest, since the Catholic priest did not satisfy him.

He was sentenced to death again in 1906 by the punitive expedition of General Reppenkampf for editing a Verkhneudinsk newspaper. And this time the death penalty was replaced for him by indefinite hard labor in Akatui. From here he was sent to a settlement and died after the revolution, in 1919 or 1920.

This man, twice sentenced to death, who served hard labor in the harshest Siberian prisons - on Kara and Akatui, turned out to be a traitor to Nechaev. For this betrayal, the government paid him with preferential conditions of detention in the Alekseevskaya ravelin and a reduction in the length of his stay there.

Nechaev had relations with Mirsky through the prison guards. According to Shchegolev, neither Mirsky nor Nechaev were completely frank with each other. However, Mirsky knew in general terms about Nechaev’s plans and reported them to the commandant. Shchegolev provided comprehensive evidence of this by publishing the traitor’s handwritten letters, which he found in the archives.

From these letters it is clear that a relationship was established between the political prisoner and the commandant of the fortress, completely unusual for a state prison. Mirsky's appeals were not official statements, but private letters. One of the letters indicates that Mirsky considered himself entitled to receive special attention from the prison administration. When the caretaker of the ravelin removed a significant part of the books from the library, Mirsky expressed surprise in a letter to the commandant: “Is it really necessary to take such precautions against me after everything that happened...”. He recalled that at one time he decided to “provide all possible service to the magnanimous government and did everything he could in this regard.” For his part, the commandant explained to the Minister of Internal Affairs the satisfaction of Mirsky’s request with the importance of the service provided by the latter to the government.

It’s disgusting to re-read some of the traitor’s letters with his requests. So, in one of them, he asked the commandant to give him, as was previously the case, on Sundays a dessert in the form of a couple of oranges, a bunch of grapes or berries, and also to provide higher quality tobacco. Obviously, he included oranges and tobacco in those “thirty pieces of silver” for which he sold Nechaev. However, he himself covered up his betrayal, of course, not with material benefits, but with “his sincere repentance.” “Having come to know God, I loved the king with all my tormented soul. Bitter tears of repentance and remorse prompted me to at least somehow mark my moral rebirth.”

There is reason to believe that Mirsky’s “services” continued in the ravelin and later. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain the visit to his cell by the Minister of Internal Affairs, as well as the head of the secret department of a separate corps of gendarmes, Sudeikin. At that time, Narodnaya Volya members were already being held here. It can be assumed that the minister and Sudeikin were interested in the latter.

On June 26, 1883, Mirsky was transferred from the Alekseevsky ravelin to the Trubetskoy bastion, and then to the House of Pre-trial Detention and sent to the Kara.

He was in the ravelin on especially preferential terms. In any case, he enjoyed the right to read magazines and purchase foreign books. The transfer from ravelin to Kara was a relief from Mirsky's fate, but this relief was too far from the pardon for which he had counted.

The conditions of Mirsky's stay in the ravelin after his betrayal were completely exceptional: he was fed oranges, grapes and berries when others were dying of scurvy and hunger. Of course, here the boundless arbitrariness characteristic of the Ravelin regime manifested itself. We do not know of other cases of such feeding of prisoners. And the benefits that were provided to Mirsky regarding reading books and magazines were also absolutely exceptional.

This situation of Mirsky in prison should be noted all the more so since the 80s were the period of the most brutal prison regime for the entire existence of Ravelin.

People's Volunteers in ALEXEEVSKY RAVELIN

Over the last 5 years of the existence of the Alekseevsky Ravelin (1880-1884), 23 prisoners passed through it, most of whom were members of the Narodnaya Volya party. Despite such a significant number of prisoners, they left almost no information about their stay in the ravelin. This can be explained very simply: the majority of these prisoners died in the ravelin itself and in the Shlisselburg fortress, where they were

translated from ravelin. In our further presentation we use, firstly, found archival materials and, secondly, memories of former prisoners.

Until now, almost no information from official sources has appeared in the press about the stay of prisoners in the Alekseevsky ravelin over the last 5 years of its existence. The cases that we found in the archives of this ravelin for the specified period and related to individual prisoners are very brief. Shiryaev was the first of the Narodnaya Volya members to be imprisoned in a ravelin. After being sentenced to death, he was imprisoned in a casemate on the lower floor of the Catherine Curtain. He was transferred to the Alekseevsky Ravelin on the night of November 10, 1880, with the strictest secrecy, and placed in cell No. 13. The list of the new prisoner’s belongings contains, among other things, a list of books belonging to him, including the following without naming the authors works such as “Mental, Moral and Physical Education”, “Comparative Statistics of Russia”, Vol. I, “Economic Life of the Landowning Population in Russia”, “Experience in Statistical Research on Peasant Allotments and Payments”, a textbook on the German language, the New Testament and etc.

It is not clear from the case whether these books were allowed into Shiryaev’s solitary confinement. In any case, Shiryaev was not given either his mother’s letters or the letters and money sent to him in the fortress by his friend Anna Dolgorukova. He was completely cut off from communication with the outside world, but, as we already know, Nechaev established relations with Shiryaev through the gendarmes.

Just a few months after his imprisonment, Shiryaev fell ill with tuberculosis. However, in the aforementioned archival file, his illness is indicated only in the document in which Shiryaev’s death was reported to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Shiryaev's death followed at 6 a.m. on August 18, 1881, “from tuberous inflammation of the entire left lung.” By order of the State Police Department, the corpse of the deceased was, in complete secrecy, transferred by gendarmes to the casemates of the lower floor of the Catherine Curtain and at 12 o'clock at night was given to the police for burial in one of the city cemeteries. Thus, Shiryaev’s corpse ended up in the casemates of the same curtain, from where 10 months before, after the death sentence was announced, he was transferred to the Alekseevsky ravelin, where the death penalty was carried out on him day after day during these months.

The next archival materials about the prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin date back to 1882. In this year, on March 26, as always, at midnight, 11 prisoners of the Trubetskoy Bastion were delivered one after another to the empty cells of the ravelin, observing the strictest secrecy. These prisoners were: Mikhailov, Kolodkevich, Frolenko, Isaev, Kletochnikov, Barannikov, Aronchik, Morozov, Langas, Trigoni and Teterka. The transfer of prisoners was carried out according to the highest order. The Police Department issued a special order on especially strict detention of Mikhailov. He was assigned a cell, isolated from others, in a small corridor where Nechaev’s cell No. 1 was. It was forbidden to take both of them out for a walk, and the rest were allowed out for a walk as far as possible separately, but no more than half an hour each.

Since, after a long break, the Alekseevsky ravelin was again filled with a significant number of prisoners on March 27, 1882, the police department prescribed new conditions for feeding prisoners. They were supposed to receive cabbage soup or soup with 1/4 pound of meat for lunch, and on fast days - pea soup. The second course was to be served with buckwheat porridge. There were two and a half pounds of black bread. The same porridge was to be served for dinner at 7 o'clock, and a mug of kvass for lunch and dinner.

From the memoirs of the prisoners we cite below, we learn that this food was given in completely insufficient quantities and poorly prepared, and worms were found in the bread. The monotony of nutrition and its insufficiency led very soon to the development of scurvy, to tuberculosis and to an increase in mortality.

The outstanding event of this year 1882 in Ravelin was the permission of Trigoni's meeting with his mother. It happened in the Catherine Curtain through the bars, in the presence of the administration, under its intense supervision. It was ordered to report to the police department what the mother and son talked about on the date and how it went. The commandant gave the required information in a special report, indicating that the conversation concerned exclusively family and economic matters.

Another outstanding event was the admission to Ravelin in the same year of 1882 of several new prisoners. So, on September 18, Ivanov, Popov and Shchedrin, brought from the Kari penal servitude, were accepted into the ravelin.

A completely exceptional fact was discovered in relation to Shchedrin. On Kara he was chained to a wheelbarrow, and she was sent with him to St. Petersburg. On the way, by order of the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, Shchedrin was freed from the wheelbarrow, which was simultaneously delivered to the Alekseevsky Ravelin.

Due to the breakdown of the wheelbarrow, Shchedrin spent some time in his solitary confinement without it. But after correction he was again chained to her. Only on October 5, 1882, Shchedrin was freed from the wheelbarrow.

Alekseevsky ravelin was filled by the end of September 1882. Sixteen cells contained prisoners, two were occupied by gendarmes, and two contained warehouses for household supplies. Warden Sokolov was therefore unable to immediately carry out the orders to place Polivanov, who was convicted in Saratov for attempting to free a political prisoner, in the ravelin.

Polivanov was temporarily placed in the Trubetskoy Bastion in an isolated cell. Sokolov hurried to prepare a cell for him in the ravelin, and on November 17 Polivanov became a prisoner of the ravelin.

In 1883, caretaker Sokolov reported with complete calm and indifference about the tragic events in the ravelin. One by one the prisoners die: July 13, 1883 - Kletochnikov, August 6, 1883 - Barannikov, August 9, 1883 - Teterka, September 11, 1883 - Langans, March 18, 1884 - Mikhailov. A special case was opened about each death. In these cases there is no information about the course of the illness: the administration was not interested in the prisoner’s illness, but only in his death. The reports reported the day and hour of death and its cause. The cause of death was almost always the same - tuberculosis.

We already know that Shiryaev died in 1881 from pulmonary tuberculosis. For Kletochnikov, death followed from “tubercular suffering of the intestinal canal”, for Barannikov - from transient pulmonary consumption, for Teterka - from debilitating fever, for Langans - from “tubercular pulmonary consumption” and in Mikhailov - from “acute catarrhal pneumonia”. Each case ends with a message of the same content. So, for example, in the Mikhailov case it was reported that his corpse was transferred to an empty casemate on the lower floor of the Catherine Curtain under lock and key “with a rifle sentry stationed at the door.” Even the corpse of a prisoner of the Alekseevsky ravelin was transferred to a solitary cell, locked and guarded by an armed sentry.

Secretly at night they brought the prisoner to the Alekseevsky ravelin, secretly at night they took the corpse of the deceased out of the ravelin, and at night, in complete secrecy, they buried this corpse in the cemetery so that no one knew the revolutionary’s grave.

The prisoner's own dress and other things, except money, watches, a cross and glasses, were burned, and the listed things and money were sent to the police department. The relatives and friends of the deceased prisoner were not notified of his death.

Only now, after the October Revolution, was it possible to establish the time and causes of death of the prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin.

In the same 1883, when the solitary cells of the Alekseevsky ravelin were vacated due to the death of prisoners, another cell was vacated as a result of the severe mental illness of prisoner Ivanov. He was transferred to the Trubetskoy bastion on September 5, 1883 and later transported to the Kazan psychiatric hospital.

The solitary cells that were vacated in Alekseevsky Ravelin were not empty for a long time. By imperial order, on April 29, 1884, 7 convicts from the Trubetskoy bastion were transferred here: Meer Gellis, Savely Zlatopolsky, Mikhail Grachevsky, Yuri Bogdanovich, Alexander Butsevich, Yegor Minakov and Ippolit Myshkin. The transfer of exiled convict political revolutionaries to the “prison of death” was motivated by the overcrowding of the Trubetskoy bastion with political prisoners under investigation. In reality, a selection was made of those political prisoners sentenced to hard labor whom tsarism considered its most dangerous enemies and for whom imprisonment in the Alekseevsky Ravelin was supposed to be a disguised death penalty.

These are the archival materials about the prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin in the very last years before its closure. The materials are not complete, but we considered it necessary to present them, since they remained unused in the literature. It is characteristic that the personal files of the prisoners do not reveal the peculiarities of this or that prisoner’s stay in the ravelin. The monotonous prison regime did not provide materials for recording prisoners' personal files. We will see below that the memories of former prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin were largely reduced to descriptions of illnesses and deaths in the ravelin.

Although the Alekseevsky ravelin took care with his murderous regime to close the lips of those who could talk about him, he did not quite succeed, and we have reached a description of the ravelin’s regime for 1882-1884 made by Frolenko, Polivanov and Trigoni.

The material and moral conditions of this regime in the 80s were the most difficult during the entire existence of the Alekseevsky Ravelin. They could only lead to premature death or serious illness. The life and health of the prisoners were undermined hourly by the dampness of the casemate.

According to Frolenko’s description, the dampness affected everything. She managed to cover the floor of the cell with plaque during the night when the prisoner did not walk on it. The paint on the floor, near the walls, where it was still preserved, was easily smeared by this dampness. The salt in the salt shaker turned into a brine solution. The mattresses stuffed with hair rotted. It can be assumed that in the 70s, when in the Alekseevsky ravelin there were only one to three cells occupied by prisoners, the rest were not heated or were heated only slightly. Therefore, the terrible dampness, which was previously characteristic of the Alekseevsky ravelin, has now spread to incredible proportions. In Polivanov’s cell, mold crusted over the prison walls so that they seemed to be painted black from the floor to two arshins in height. With such dampness, there was also not enough light and fresh air in the cell. The window was carefully painted over with white paint, and instead of a window, a narrow tin pipe with a thick strainer at the outer end, covered with cobwebs, was inserted into the upper part of the frame. To this it should be added that some prisoners only 5 or 6 months after imprisonment in the ravelin began to be taken out for 15-minute walks. Only later the walking time was increased to 45 minutes.

The prisoners' food was insufficient, and the bread was mixed with cockle and even worms. But the first day of stay in the ravelin for Frolenko and 9 other prisoners, who arrived here on the night of March 26, 1882, was an exception, as if calculated to make the prisoners then feel more strongly the burden of the prison regime. Frolenko recalled that on the first day in the morning he was served tea with a roll and black bread. For lunch they served large portions of cabbage soup with meat and roast and, as Frolenko remembered, even a sweet dish. At the same time, napkins and a silver spoon were served. In the evening tea was served, then dinner. It was the Saturday before Easter. The prisoners assumed that their food would be even better on Sunday. They were wrong. In the morning, instead of tea, there was water with a piece of rye bread and a small cottage cheese pastry. At lunch they served cabbage soup, and instead of roast, they served thin porridge. The wooden spoon replaced the silver one, the napkin disappeared. It is difficult to find any explanation for this sudden change in nutrition, other than the desire of the administration indicated by us to force the prisoners to experience the bitter feeling of mockery of them. This assumption is all the more likely because on the same day the prisoners were dressed in convict clothes.

Trigoni, who entered the Alekseevsky Ravelin at the same time as Frolenko, painted exactly the same picture of the change in the prison regime during the first day of the prisoners’ stay in prison. He also experienced the difference in food on Saturday and Sunday and the mockery of changing from clothes issued on Saturday into another dress exactly 24 hours later. He recalled how he was pleasantly surprised to receive “beautiful linen, made of thin canvas, a new black, comfortable robe, and shoes - low shoes, even smart ones.” The next day, just on Easter Sunday, all this was taken away and replaced, like Frolenko’s, with sackcloth underwear, a rough prisoner’s dress and old cats. One should not think that such a change in food and clothing on the second day of imprisonment in ravelin was associated with the entry into force of the sentence. It came into force much earlier, even during the stay of prisoners in the Trubetskoy Bastion. Thus, no formal justification can be found for changing food and clothing.

The same prisoner introduced us to the appearance of a prison cell in the Alekseevsky ravelin in 1882. Its walls were painted yellow. The window frame was the usual size, like in residential buildings, but the glass in the frame was frosted. The entire furnishings of the cell consisted of an oak table and chair, a wooden bed with a mattress, sheets, blanket and pillow, and a portable toilet seat. Water for washing was brought in the morning, and subsequently metal washbasins were installed. The furnishings were complemented by a kerosene lamp.

We will not reproduce the description of the appearance of the Alekseevsky ravelin that is already known to us, but we will note several instructions from the author about the garden in front of the ravelin. It seems to us that we should not miss the small touches of the everyday side of the Alekseevsky ravelin, information about which was kept secret, no matter what it concerned. In this kindergarten, prisoners appeared for short minutes and not every day. The prisoners drew at least a little strength here to maintain their deteriorating health. Polivanov gave a very detailed description of this kindergarten in summer and winter. No wonder the prisoners called him by the diminutive name “kindergarten.” It was a small triangle, its vegetation consisted of four apple trees, ten tall but not thick birches, one linden, one small Christmas tree and elderberry bushes, lilacs, raspberries, and currants. In the garden there were two flower beds with a cast-iron bench at each of them. To the prisoners, this vegetation seemed lush and rich. In winter, a narrow straight path was cleared of snow for walking, along which the prisoner walked back and forth. However, it was allowed to sit on the bench. Later, with the onset of warm weather, a heap of sand was piled up near this bench, and the prisoners were allowed to pour it from place to place, but it was forbidden to sprinkle it on the paths for fear that the prisoners would establish communication among themselves by using any sand figures along the paths.

No physical labor was allowed in the Alekseevskaya ravelin. The prohibition of physical labor was in full accordance with the entire regime of the Alekseevsky Ravelin. It is difficult to describe this regime because it was too monotonous and meaningless. Its distinctive feature was its vacuity. The tsarist government made sure that life in the ravelin's solitary confinement was completely isolated from all external impressions. First of all, the regime was aimed at not giving prisoners food for any mental work, and at the same time not giving them the opportunity to engage in any physical labor, although they were sentenced to hard labor.

Monotony was a characteristic feature of the regime in most prisons during the period under study. But in the Alekseevskaya ravelin the monotony was carried out with amazing, unprecedented completeness. Every day in prison was an exact copy of other similar days. The life of each prisoner in the ravelin repeated with amazing accuracy the existence of all the other prisoners there. We know that this was required of every prison, but no other Russian prison managed to implement a similar regime to such an extent as in the Alekseevsky Ravelin. He owes this to the caretaker Sokolov, whose name is associated not only with the history of the Alekseevsky ravelin in the last years of its existence, but also with the history of the new prison in the Shlisselburg fortress.

The historian of the royal prison cannot ignore the activities of this jailer. We do not know of any other jailer whose “glory” could be equal to the “glory” of Sokolov, or “Herod”, as the prisoners called him. He gained “fame” for his activities in both prisons we named - in the Alekseevsky ravelin and in the new prison of the Shlisselburg fortress, where he moved in August 1884. Therefore, when characterizing Sokolov, we have to base this essay on the Alekseevsky Ravelin on the results of his activities in the Shlisselburg fortress.

The name Sokolov became known to wide circles only many years later, after the end of his official career; the mystery that shrouded the Alekseevsky ravelin and the Shlisselburg fortress kept the name of Sokolov secret. When the opportunity arose for the memoirs of former prisoners of state prisons to appear in print, each author paid attention to this soulless executioner. His role in the creation of the prison regime of Alekseevsky Ravelin and Shlisselburg was exceptionally great.

Matvey Sokolov was born into a bourgeois family in 1834. His education is low, he graduated from the school of cantonists." He began military service as a private at an early age and already in his seventeenth year served in the regiment. He took part in pacifying the Polish uprising and was awarded an order. Soon after this, Sokolov transferred to the gendarmerie. Obviously, on this new In the field, he was completely in his place. We do not know the “feats” he accomplished, but they undoubtedly happened, as this is evidenced by Sokolov’s transfer “by the highest order” in 1866 to serve in the III department to carry out special assignments with enlistment. to the gendarme division.

In 1880, this former cantonist already had the rank of staff captain. After Nechaev’s actions were revealed, Sokolov was appointed to the Alekseevsky ravelin to restore “order” and in May 1882 “was confirmed as the caretaker of this ravelin. Thus began the career of this jailer, and his characteristics were given to us by the prisoners themselves. It is worth dwelling on it.

As we already know, Sokolov was a completely uneducated person. His service in the army and then in the gendarmerie did not in any way raise the level of education with which he left the cantonist school at the age of 16. Such service only turned him into a servant, ready to carry out the orders of his superiors without any consideration. The main trait of his character was diligence and readiness to always accurately do everything that his superiors ordered him to do. Such blind obedience was the motto of his life. This was his philosophy. According to V. Figner, Sokolov said: “If they order a prisoner to say “Your Excellency,” I will say “Your Excellency”; If they order me to strangle you, I will strangle you.”

Let us add that no one ordered him to speak respectfully to the prisoners, just as “he was not given direct, overt orders to strangle the prisoners. But this uneducated gendarme had enough natural ingenuity to guess that he was assigned to the role of strangler in prison. E E. Kolosov noted Sokolov’s ability to find the most sensitive, painful places in each prisoner. Then he began to methodically play on them, causing real torture to his victim. Kolosov calls Sokolov’s observation subtle, in complete contradiction with his primitive rudeness.

The prisoners assessed Sokolov as a cruel executioner who served the Tsar not out of fear, but out of conscience. In fact, he did not let a single case pass by his hands that in one way or another related to the prison. He spent days and nights in it. For example, he carefully appeared in the new prison of the Shlisselburg fortress between nine o’clock in the evening and six o’clock in the morning four times. He himself caught prisoners tapping.

Volkenstein recalled how Sokolov, completely unexpectedly for the prisoners, caught them tapping on Easter morning at dawn, when he was not expected at all. According to Figner, this jailer loved his craft and was a real guard dog, a Cerberus, like the three-headed dog at the gates of Tartarus.

To establish a murderous regime in the Alekseevsky ravelin and in the Shlisselburg fortress, Sokolov had well-selected gendarmes. They were worthy of their boss. It would seem that Sokolov should have completely trusted them. But he didn't trust any of them to any degree. This was the basic rule of his management of the prison. Therefore, he did not allow either gendarmes or doctors into the prisoners’ cell without him. For example, in the Alekseevsky ravelin he was present during the morning cleaning of each cell. He tirelessly, with intense attention, watched the gendarmes and prisoners as they distributed food to the latter three times a day. He himself came with the gendarmes for the prisoner to take him for a walk, and during the walk each prisoner and the guards were under the watchful supervision of Sokolov. He himself took the prisoner back to his cell after the walk. With his participation, the gendarmes took or dragged the offender from the cell to the punishment cell. He was, so to speak, an indispensable assistant to the prison doctor when visiting sick prisoners and tried to allow such visits as rarely as possible. Finally, under his supervision, the corpse of the deceased was taken out of prison. He had enough strength and time for all this. He was a man with the nerves of an ox. He calmly watched as, one after another, people in their solitary confinement went crazy and died before his eyes. His nature was, as it were, in accordance with the iron and stone from which the state prison was built.

In his activities, the head of the prison, Sokolov, was guided by a very simple rule: to implement the principle of solitary confinement for each prisoner without any relief. To achieve this, he stopped at nothing and spared neither others nor himself. At the same time, he was not afraid that he was exceeding the rights granted to him, but he also did not hesitate to perform duties that did not directly fall on him. In the Alekseevsky Ravelin, for example, he allowed a doctor to see a prisoner only after making sure that the prisoner was ill. He personally locked and unlocked the doors of the prison cells.

In 1887, Sokolov was dismissed after the suicide of Grachevsky in the Shlisselburg fortress.

Novorussky, after his release from the fortress in 1905, sought out Sokolov in St. Petersburg, trying to collect information from him about the former prisoners of the fortress. But the old jailer remained true to himself and did not tell the secrets of the fortress, which Alexander III had appointed him to guard.

When you reread the memories of your stay in the Alekseevsky ravelin during the 80s, you see that neither Sokolov nor his guards fought or swore, and there were no general protests or violent speeches from any of them on the part of the prisoners. separately. Sokolov was not beaten, but killed by the regime he introduced. The memories of Polivanov, Frolenko and Trigoni boil down to descriptions of how prisoners were sick and dying in the Alekseevskaya ravelin. Actually, about the regime, the authors of the memoirs could only say that they were deprived of light, air, all communication, books except religious ones, physical work, visits and correspondence with relatives. In other words, they were deprived of everything they needed to continue living. To maintain such a life, some of them did not have enough strength, already exhausted by the previous years of struggle.

Unfortunately, in the archives of the Alekseevsky ravelin there were almost no files preserved from this period (1880-1884) that would shed light on the regime in the ravelin. Of the available memoirs, the most complete are the memoirs compiled by Polivanov after his transfer to the Shlisselburg fortress and later published by him. However, when assessing the degree of completeness of these memories, it should be remembered that the life of the prisoners of Ravelin was very monotonous and their attention focused on such phenomena that seem unimportant. We will not miss them, as they help us understand the features of the prison regime of the Alekseevsky ravelin.

Polivanov was placed in cell No. 5. Next to him, in cell No. 4, Shchedrin was placed two months earlier (September 18, 1882). Shchedrin was sentenced to hanging in 1881 in the case of the “South Russian Union of Workers” in Kyiv and, instead of the death penalty, was sent to Siberia. While in the Irkutsk prison, for striking a Ministry of Internal Affairs official in the face, he was again sentenced to death, which was commuted to being chained to a wheelbarrow. Shchedrin was sent to the Kara, from where, after the unsuccessful escape of 8 Carians, he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Polivanov was in complete isolation from the outside world until relations were established between him and Shchedrin through knocking. In his memoirs, he described the cruel Sokolov, his assistant Yakovlev, and the equally soulless and rude prison doctor Williams. Despite the swelling in Polivanov’s hand, the prison doctor refused to help him. The mission of this doctor was by no means to provide serious assistance to sick prisoners. He did not take measures to improve the sanitary conditions of the ravelin.

Even before his communication with Shchedrin, Polivanov guessed that he had ended up in the Alekseevsky Ravelin. He was convinced of the correctness of his assumption when he saw the stamp “A. R. 1864”, and on the bowl - “A. R. 1819.”

Dinner dishes were not taken out of the cell, and the prisoners themselves had to wash them with cold water, so the dishes could not be kept properly clean. Into a metal mug in the cell, Polivanov squeezed water from a rag on the windowsill. He kept a daily count of the water collected in this way, which he poured into the washbasin. Besides this “activity”, there was only one more thing: sweeping the floor with a mop. One can imagine the prisoner's excitement when he heard an inviting knock on the wall from the next cell. The tapping with Shchedrin began.

Polivanov believed that the tapping in the ravelin was more successful than in the Trubetskoy Bastion and in the Shlisselburg Fortress. The gendarmes, who were not wearing soft shoes, had difficulty quietly sneaking up to the “peephole” of the prison cell and catching the prisoner tapping. It was even more difficult for Sokolov to do this, who wore squeaky boots and spurs. Both neighbors spent whole hours tapping and arguing about revolutionary tactics. Polivanov learned from Shchedrin about the fate of many comrades and about the blows that were dealt to the revolutionary movement. Polivanov could not have any communication with the other neighboring cell, since it was occupied by the armory.

From Polivanov we learned about the details of the prisoners' walks. All the time, two guards walked non-stop along one side of the prison garden - one towards the other, without losing sight of the prisoner in the garden. Sokolov constantly, through a special window in the wall, checked whether any violations were being committed during the walk. Polivanov was taken for walks only every other day.

During walks, the cell was searched and examined. During one of these inspections, Sokolov discovered an ear print on a moldy wall: the prisoner pressed his ear to the wall to better hear the knocking of his comrade. Sokolov transferred Polivanov to cell No. 3, adjacent to cell No. 2, where the gendarmes were housed.

Here Polivanov spent eight months in complete solitude, sometimes without uttering a word for entire months. He was given a Bible to read during his stay in cell No. 5. Very rarely, he was able to stand on the windowsill and look out the window through the holes punched in the iron sheet for air flow, which was the only entertainment. There was no one to knock with. Such loneliness led the prisoner to mental illness, from which he, however, recovered after some time. However, this disease led him to twice failed suicide attempts.

Besides mental illness, something else began to happen. Poor nutrition led to a severe form of scurvy. At this time, several prisoners were already sick with this disease. In the period 1881-1884. out of 24 prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin, 7 people died.

Polivanov, Frolenko and Trigoni report that scurvy was common among prisoners.

The widespread development of scurvy threatened to leave the ravelin without prisoners due to their extinction. The food was slightly improved and the time for walking was increased.

Despite all Sokolov's measures to prevent prisoners from communicating with each other, some prisoners managed to communicate with each other. Polivanov, after being transferred to cell No. 15 (this was the third cell he occupied in the ravelin), established relations with his comrades by marking letters in a book from the prison library. During this time, Myshkin managed to correspond with some of his comrades through notes. The prisoners wrote short notes on ribbons torn from the margins of the book. Instead of a pencil, they used a charred match. Such notes were successfully attached to the handle of a shovel, which remained in the kindergarten where the prisoners took walks. Receiving such a note was a huge event in the life of the prisoner of the Alekseevsky ravelin.

The prisoners did not meet each other either in the corridors or on walks.

This is the information about the Alekseevskaya ravelin for the last years of its existence until the beginning of August 1884. The authors of memoirs had nothing more to write about. The very brevity of these terrible memories speaks of the transformation of imprisonment in this ravelin into a painful death penalty.

While the prisoners of the Alekseevsky Ravelin spent terrible years in this prison, the new emperor was building a new prison for them on Shlisselburg Island. It was supposed to be the same place of slow execution as the Alekseevsky Ravelin was. We will learn about this in the chapter on the Shlisselburg fortress. The authors of the memoirs about Alekseevsky Ravelin mentioned by us and especially Polivanov wrote how they were transported from one prison to another. They were shackled in leg shackles, and their hands were linked with a short chain. One by one they were taken out of the ravelin and delivered to the barge, into single closets arranged in it. The river police steamer delivered this barge with prisoners to Shlisselburg Island. Sixteen people from the Alekseevsky ravelin and six from the Trubetskoy bastion were transported in this way on August 2 and 4, 1884 to the new prison.

However, Alekseevsky's ravelin so justified the hopes placed on him by the tsarism that the new prison on Shlisselburg Island had him as its prototype. “Herod” Sokolov remained its caretaker. New pages were written into the history of the prison.

The Secret House building will be demolished at the end of the 19th century, and in its place, as if hiding even its foundations, a building for the Naval Archives will be built.

Zotov Bastion

At the Nikolskaya curtain. It was built under the supervision of the uncle and educator of Peter I, Moscow Duma clerk Anikita Moiseevich Zotov.

The St. Petersburg fortress was built according to all the rules of military engineering. During its construction, the latest achievements of Western European fortification were used. The main fortress fence followed the coastline, leaving not even a piece of land for an enemy landing. The bastion pushed forward increased the battle area. Not a single enemy ship could approach the fortress within firing distance, and its guns controlled the Neva fairway. The entire system of the fortress made it possible to defend against any enemy attack without loss. A canal dug inside the fortress provided the defenders of the fortress with an unlimited resource of drinking water.

The walls of the bastion, up to 12 meters high, are made of brick. They consist of two parts: the outer wall facing the duct, which is called the scarp. Its thickness reaches from 3 to 8 meters. The internal or valganga wall facing the inside of the fortress has brickwork up to 2 meters thick. By the way, this can be clearly seen from the windows cutting through the thickness of the wall. The embrasures have the shape of pointed niches.

Inside, behind the large striped gates, there are casemates. Depending on their purpose, they were protective and defensive. As stated in the documents, “... security casemates serve as storage facilities for firearms... and food... for the living of the garrison.” Defensive casemates were intended to accommodate guns and riflemen. The dimensions of the two-tier casemates were quite impressive - lengths ranged from 12 to 16 meters, and widths from 3 to 6.

In addition to defensive and security casemates, the fortress also had gunpowder caches. They were located in the fronts of the bastions. On the Zotovy Bastion, to the right of the center, you can see two openings leading into the fortress - a window and a door.” These are the powder chambers.

In the center of the bastion there is a gentle rise to the top - a ramp. They rolled guns onto the fortress walls along it. All bastions of the Peter and Paul Fortress, except for the ceremonial Naryshkin, had such ramps. The system of the fortress fence also included a secret passage - a sortia. It made it possible to exit the casemate through a narrow corridor to the outer wall of the fortress. There were two such passages in the fortress, one of them is located in the Zot Bastion.

Over time, the casemates of the Zotov Bastion also became a place of imprisonment for prisoners, and “especially dangerous criminals,” which included “enemies of the throne, the Fatherland and the Orthodox faith.”

Embezzlers undoubtedly were considered especially dangerous. They were treated very harshly. One of the first prisoners in the fortress in 1717 were 22 sailors from the ship "Revel", arrested in the Admiralty case of embezzlement. In 1738, cabinet minister Artemy Volynsky, the leader of the conspiracy against Biron, the all-powerful favorite of Empress Anna Ioannovna, was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and two years later he was beheaded at Sytny Market. Biron himself, arrested by Field Marshal Minich after the death of the Empress, was in the fortress until he was sent into exile. And when, as a result of a palace coup, Elizaveta Petrovna ascended the throne, Minich would also be arrested. By the way, he participated in the construction of the fortress, continuing the work of Domenico Trezzini.

Often, writers were among the most dangerous criminals - their works were equated to especially dangerous political crimes. The untimeliness of their thoughts caused serious anger from the authorities. So in 1726, Ivan Timofeevich Pososhkov, the author of “The Book of Poverty and Wealth,” was in the fortress. His book was the first economic criticism of the existing system. The author was “rewarded” by imprisonment in a fortress, where he died after 5 months of arrest. It is worth mentioning one more writer. In 1790, Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev was arrested for his book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.” Empress Catherine II, having familiarized herself with its contents, considered that “... this work is outrageous and criminal... the author aims to bring the people into indignation against the bosses and authorities.” The court verdict is death penalty. However, the empress showed mercy - Radishchev was pardoned and exiled to the Islim prison in Siberia for 10 years.
The prisoners of the fortress were a motley kaleidoscope of very different and amazing destinies.

The places of detention in the fortress were never empty. But there were cases when prison premises could not accommodate all the prisoners. For the first time this happened in connection with the “Semyonov story”. In 1820, 1,500 soldiers of the Semenovsky regiment found themselves in the fortress at the same time. They were arrested for their declared protest against rough drills and cruel treatment of the lower ranks of the regimental commander. The soldiers were placed in curtain casemates equipped as barracks. Dampness, half-starvation, and extreme overcrowding led to so many diseases that a special infirmary was created in the fortress for Semyonovtsy. According to the sentence, the instigators were to be driven through the ranks six times (6 thousand blows with spitzrutens), then sent to hard labor in the mines. The entire regiment in its old composition was disbanded. Even a spontaneous action in the army was an unprecedented event. Therefore, apparently, one of his contemporaries wrote: “this will serve as the threshold of important and unprecedented events.” These events were not long in coming. In 1825, the Decembrists, participants in the uprising on Senate Square, were kept within the walls of the fortress. The commandant of the fortress was ordered to keep the prisoners as “villains,” and the Decembrist Zubkov would later write in his memoirs: “The inventors of the gallows and beheading are the benefactors of humanity, the one who invented solitary confinement is a vile scoundrel.”

For the Decembrists, 11 categories of guilt were determined, five leaders of the uprising were placed outside the categories and sentenced to death. Those sentenced to death spent the last night in the casemates of the Kronverkskaya curtain, and in the morning they were hanged on the right shaft of the crownwork.

Ioannovsky ravelin

On November 4, 1880, a gallows was erected on the wall of the left half-counterguard of Ioannovsky Ravelin, and at 8:10 a.m., prominent Narodnaya Volya members Alexander Alexandrovich Kvyatkovsky and Andrei Korneevich Presnyakov died here.

In the second half of the 18th century, in the territory Alekseevsky ravelin A wooden prison building was built. During the reign of Paul I, in 1796-1797, a new one appeared in its place - a stone one. Paul I ordered: “For those held in custody on matters related to the secret expedition, make a house convenient for keeping them in the fortress.” This prison became known as the Secret House.
The prisoner was identified by the number of the cell in which he was kept. Upon his arrival, a recording was made; “A person has arrived,” in the event of death or transfer to another place of detention, they wrote down: “A person has left.”

Prisoners of the Secret House

The prisoners of this prison were Decembrists, Petrashevites, revolutionary democrats of the 60s, Narodnaya Volya members, as well as 10 soldiers and two non-commissioned officers of the Semenovsky regiment.
Of the Decembrists, I. D. Yakushkin, A. I. Odoevsky, N. A. and M. A. Bestuzhevs, S. P. Trubetskoy, I. I. Pushchin, K. F. Ryleev, P. I were kept in the Secret House . Pestel, S. I. Muravyov-Apostol.
In 1849, 13 people from the circle of M.V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky were imprisoned in the Secret House: M.V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky himself, A.P. Balasoglo, S.F. Durov, P.A. Kuzmin, F.G. Tolya and others. For eight months, the writer F. M. Dostoevsky was here for the Butashevich-Petrashevsky case.
Democratic revolutionaries V. A. Obruchev, N. A. Serno-Solovyevich, N. V. Shelgunov were also in this prison.
N. G. Chernyshevsky spent 678 days, from July 7, 1862 to May 20, 1864, in the Secret House. Here he wrote the famous novel “What is to be done?” Chernyshevsky worked a lot, even refused to go out; studied history, translations, political economy. The total volume of manuscripts he wrote was about 205 printed sheets. Creativity made it easier to endure the prison regime.

In 1882-1884, the prisoners of the Secret House were members of the Narodnaya Volya party, tried in the “trial of 20”: A. D. Mikhailov, M. F. Frolenko, A. I. Barannikov, N. N. Kolodkevich and others . During this time, six of them died.

Description of the Secret House of the Peter and Paul Fortress

The secret house was a stone, one-story, triangular building. It had 26 cells. 20-21 of them were usually used for solitary confinement and were called numbers. Some of the cells were occupied by the caretaker's apartment, a workshop and a library. (The prisoners’ own clothes, some things taken during the arrest, and other property were kept in the prison.
The secret house of the Alekseevsky ravelin operated until 1884. The tsarist government built a new secret prison further from the capital - in the Shlisselburg fortress.
The prisoners of the Secret House were transferred there along with the property of the prison, along with the caretaker Sokolov - Herod. At the end of the 19th century, the building of the Secret House was demolished. On the site of the prison, a house was built for the Military Historical Archive.

Alekseevsky ravelin

fortification behind the fortress wall on the western side of the Peter and Paul Fortress (See Peter and Paul Fortress) in St. Petersburg, founded in 1733 by Empress Anna Ivanovna in honor of her grandfather, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Behind the wall of A. r. In 1797, by order of Paul I, a single political secret prison was built - a triangular, one-story stone building (until 1797 there was a wooden prison in the Argentine Republic) for 20 prisoners. Regime in A. r. was distinguished by its particular cruelty, designed for the slow destruction of prisoners, most of whom were political prisoners. In 1793, F.V. Krechetov was imprisoned there. During 1825-84 through the casemates of the A. r. More than 20 Decembrists passed through (including P.I. Pestel, K.F. Ryleev, P.G. Kakhovsky); 3 members of the Cyril and Methodius Society; about 15 people Petrashevtsy (See Petrashevtsy) (including M.V. Petrashevsky, F.M. Dostoevsky); several participants in the Polish Uprising of 1830-31; M. A. Bakunin (in 1851-54); N. G. Chernyshevsky (in 1862-64), who wrote in A. r. novel “What to do?”; V. Al. Obruchev, N.V. Shelgunov, N.A. Serno-Solovyevich, D.V. Karakozov, N.V. Kletochnikov, A.D. Mikhailov, N.A. Morozov, I.N. Myshkin, M.F. Frolenko and others. Decembrist G.S. Batenkov spent about 20 years there, M.S. Beideman 20 years, S.G. Nechaev about 10 years. In 1884 the prison was abolished, and in 1895 the building of the A.R. was demolished.

Lit.: Gernet M.N., History of the Tsar’s Prison, 2nd ed., vol. 1 - 3, M., 1951 - 52; Shchegolev P. E., Alekseevsky Ravelin, M., 1929; Frolenko M.F., “Mercy” (From the memoirs of Alekseevsky Ravelin), 2nd ed., M., 1928.

Great Soviet Encyclopedia. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. 1969-1978 .

See what “Alekseevsky Ravelin” is in other dictionaries:

Alekseevsky ravelin- Alekseevsky ravelin, external fortification of the Peter and Paul Fortress, in its western part, in front of the Vasilyevskaya curtain. Named in honor of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the father of Peter I and the grandfather of the king who reigned in the 1730s. Anna Ivanovna. Built in... ... Encyclopedic reference book "St. Petersburg"

External fortification of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Laid down in 1733, named in honor of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. In 1797, a secret house was built inside the Alekseevsky ravelin (until 1884 a political prison with a particularly cruel regime), demolished in 1895... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

ALEXEEVSKY RAVELIN, external fortification of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Laid down in 1733, named in honor of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. In 1797, inside the A. r. a secret house was built (until 1884 a political prison with a particularly cruel regime, ... ... Russian history

External fortification of the Peter and Paul Fortress, in its western part, in front of the Vasilievskaya curtain. Named in honor of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, father of Peter I and grandfather, who reigned in the 1730s. Anna Ivanovna. Built in 1733 40 (engineer B. X. Minich).… … St. Petersburg (encyclopedia)

- (French ravelin) fortification behind the fortress wall to the west. side of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, founded on June 20, 1733 by the imp. Anna Ivanovna in honor of the grandfather of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Behind the wall of A. r. built in 1797 by order of Paul I... ... Soviet historical encyclopedia

External fortification of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Laid down in 1733, named in honor of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. In 1796-1797, a “secret house” was built inside the Alekseevsky ravelin (until 1884 a political prison with a particularly cruel regime, demolished in 1895). * * * … Encyclopedic Dictionary

- ... Wikipedia

Alekseevsky ravelin- Alex Eevsky raveled in... Russian spelling dictionary

Alekseevsky ravelin is the western ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. It covers the Trubetskoy and Zotov bastions, as well as the Vasilievskaya curtain and Vasilievsky Gate... Wikipedia

- ... Wikipedia

Books

• Alekseevsky ravelin. A book about the fall and greatness of man, P. Shchegolev. Lifetime edition. Moscow, 1929. Publishing house "Federation". Typographic binding. The condition is good. In the published work of P. E. Shchegolev (1877-1931) - an outstanding Russian...
• Alekseevsky Ravelin: excerpt from memoirs, P. Polivanov. This book will be produced in accordance with your order using Print-on-Demand technology. Reproduced in the original author's spelling of the 1906 edition (publishing house "Izd. Vl.…